


Culpability

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 23:10:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7289815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Vex's brush with death, Percy and Cassandra have a conversation about judgment and guilt, and work out a few of the knots in the tangle of past regrets and mistakes that shadow them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Culpability

Cassandra had had every intention of slipping out of her armor and falling into bed as soon as she got back to the castle; her sparring partners did not spare her on account of her noble blood, and she felt sore down to her soul.  Sore, but satisfied, her mind somewhat quieted in the way only exhaustion could bring.  For once she was looking forward to sleep.  But as she stepped into the hallway that led to her room, a familiar noise caught her ears.  The clang of metal on metal in a steady, practiced rhythm echoed through the bare stone walls.

It sparked dozens of memories.

She followed the sound, tracing the familiar path to Percy’s workshop with a mix of nostalgia and bitterness.  For a moment, standing on the threshold, she felt sixteen again, set on disrupting her studious brother’s tinkering.  He took it so seriously, it set her teeth on edge; but the way she could topple his orderly little space was unfailingly amusing.  He always managed to retaliate in some clever, cruel way; that was just part of the fun.

But there was an unbreachable gulf between Cassandra de Rolo, the little girl with shining eyes and mischief in her soul, and the scarred woman who stood in the doorway now.  She was a stranger to that girl, a stranger with a thorn-scarred soul and the weight of years of bitterness on her shoulders.  Cassandra had had enough spirit for ten lifetimes, someone once had said, but she had burned it all on one rescue and one failed rebellion.  She was so tired.

She could feel the girl she had been for a moment, almost as an entity apart from her.  And then the tenuous connected broke and she was standing in the doorway alone, staring into Percy’s workshop.

Her brother had yet to notice her.  He was hard at work.  The forge had been stoked to a high heat, and the workshop was lit by what looked like dozens of oil lamps, producing a glow so strong it almost mimicked daylight.  Tongs were cooling in a pail of water, and Percy had stepped away from the forge a minute to examine something on his worktable.

From here, not much seemed to have changed.  He was more confident, in the way he handled the cooling metal object- an arrowhead- he had forged.  The way he moved about his workshop had a well-practiced air, beyond what she had seen of his work when she was a child.  It made sense.  Then, he had been an idle noble scholar with an interesting hobby.  Now, he and his companions lived and died by his inventions.

And his hair.  Cassandra supposed she could be grateful for small mercies, like the fact that hers was only shot through with white, and had not succumbed entirely.  But it suited him.  He looked rather dashing usually, with his blue coat and white hair and weaponry. Nothing like the Percy she had known, and at the same time, very much like him.

Here, in his workshop, he had stripped down to his pants and a shirt stained with black powder and singed at the cuffs, so he was dressed much as he would have been five years before.  Before everything went to the Nine Hells.

It was only when he spoke, when those flinty grey eyes looked into hers, that she remembered the smoky entity that had surrounded him, and her name engraved on the barrel of his gun.  His gun.

Her fussy, scholarly brother, always so conscientious, always so studious, had created an entirely new way of killing.

She stood and watched him work for a moment longer, clinging to the last vestiges of nostalgia, before speaking.

“Percival.”

He started, and spun around, his hand automatically reached to his belt, before relaxing when he realized it was her.  “Cassandra.”  He offered her a smile, a gesture that was tarnished slightly by the fact one of his eyes was bruised and swollen, and then blinked, his good eye widening.

“The guards at the gate told me you and the rest of Vox Machina had returned.  With company?”

“Have you been… fighting?” he asked, taking in her sweaty, dirt-smudged face and worn leathers.  “Is there some sort of-”

“Relax,” Cassandra said, tossing her head.  In a moment, he had switched from tired to ready to fight, a transition she was still not used to seeing.  “No need to pull your gun out.  I was just sparring.”

He gave her a wry look, and turned back to examine the arrowhead.  “At this hour?  You should be asleep.”

“I could say the same to you,” Cassandra said, taking a step closer to peer over her brother’s shoulder.

“I’m not the one who has Whitestone depending on the clarity of my mind,” Percy said, picking up the arrowhead and turning it over in his fingers.  “It is my responsibility to make things like this, not choices.  I’ve established well that those is not my strong suit.”

“No, the whole world is depending on your clarity of mind,” Cassandra said.  “Whitestone along with it.  Unless you’ve forgotten the dragons that could come knocking at any moment.”  The only response she got was a little snort.  “Besides, nobody in Whitestone relies on the clarity of my mind, luckily, or my ability to make decisions.  I’ve got a council for making those.  One that you chose to form.”

Again, he smiled wearily, but didn’t look at her.  “Don’t sell your impact short, Cassandra.  Keeper Yennen tells me you have been instrumental in piecing this city back together, and removing the influences of the Briarwoods.”

Cassandra opened her mouth to argue- but closed it when she looked at him, really looked at him, again.  Percy always looked tired.  There wasn’t a time she had seen him since their reunion when he looked completely hale and hearty, and he had never had a particularly strong constitution when they were younger.  But he had looked better after… whatever had happened, with the black smoke, and the acid pits, and her name wrought in metal.  She had yet to get the full story- she was afraid to ask, and afraid to trust her own memory.  There were so many holes.  

All she understood is that Percy had sold his soul, and his friends had won it back.

She could not fault him for that, even if a part of her could not help but flinch away from him when she thought of her name as part of that pact.  They had both sold their souls.  At least Percy had friends to return his to him by force.  Cassandra was still looking for hers, to the best of her awareness.

But after the events under Whitestone Castle, Percy had begun to look healthier, not quite the haunted, fucked-up shadow of her brother she had been reunited with on the path to his revenge.  A burden had been lifted off his shoulders, and quietly, he had seemed happy. She had been wrapped up in her own struggles, mostly, but the aptness she had once had for reading Percy- which came in handy in winding him up- had not completely faded, and he seemed happy.

Now he looked as bad, or worse, again.  The eye that wasn’t swollen was deeply shadowed and his eyes had a hard, distant look that reminded her of the entity that had tried to seize control of him.  His face was smudged with black powder and soot but there were tear tracks through it.  

His hands, holding the arrowhead, were shaking.

“You look awful,” she said, leaning against his worktable.  “Go toe to toe with another ghost?  Or an undead giant?”

He laughed, and shook his head.  “No.”

“No?” she said, reaching back to pick up a piece of metal from his worktable.  It turned out to be one of the projectiles for his gun, a bullet, as Ripley had called it.  She turned the little metal piece over in her fingers for a moment, before Percy noticed and snatched it away from her.

“Must I still remind you not to touch my things?” he asked, setting the bullet down and going back to fiddling with the arrowhead.  

“It seems so,” she said, bracing the backs of her hands on the worktable so she could hop up to sit on it.  She swung her legs like a child, scraping the leather of her boots together.  After a few moments of the continuous sound, he started to grind his teeth.  Another moment and he finally looked up at her.

“You are a child,” he said.  “You never did learn.”

“There wasn’t anyone around to reinforce those lessons,” she said, but didn’t drop her gaze from his.  She had won his attention; but he had redirected her from her concern, whether intentionally or otherwise.  There was a reservoir of bitterness in her that she managed to stopper up most of the time, because otherwise she couldn’t function, couldn’t even begin to enjoy the fact that Whitestone was free and she had a role to play in its protection, and she had family again.  However absent.

But that bitterness leaked out now, the wellwater drawn out by Percy’s words.  “I learned lessons, of course.  But they weren’t the sort Mother or Father would have approved of.  Did little to improve my eligibility.  Rather ruined it, I suspect.”

She could see the hurt in his expression for a moment, the guilt.  This was just a part of the little dance they had; Percy had left her to die in the snow.  She had betrayed the people of Whitestone, fed their revolutions to the Briarwoods.  He had taken five years to come back.  She had spent four years destroying their home.  She had won his trust, and betrayed him and his friends to the Briarwoods.  He had had a gun with her name engraved on one of its barrels.  Against his will, he had told her, in one of the desperate moments when they would have been fighting if they had had enough faith in their newly-reformed connection to put it to the test.

His face closed off again, his eyes slipping back to the arrowhead.  

She scooted over on the worktable, picking up the arrowhead and moving herself partially in front of him.

That drew a long, irritated sigh from him that was so Percy she almost laughed.  She had heard that sound more often from him than her own name, when they were younger.  The entirety of the de Rolo bloodline had done a lot of sighing over her.

“What do you want, Cassandra?” he snapped.

“I can’t sleep,” she said.   “That’s why I was sparring, at this hour.  I can’t sleep anymore, unless I’m so exhausted I can’t think.  The Briarwoods are gone, but my mind is not my own.  I… I can’t trust anything.  Not my mind, or my judgement… every decision I make I agonize over, and double and triple-check with most of the council.  And I still am making so many mistakes.  I feel like the others do not trust me, not truly; they know what I did.  They are waiting for me to snap, or to… to become like the Briarwoods.  I can’t think, and I don’t want to sleep, even when I can force myself too, because I dream of them every night.”

“Them?” he asks, without any real need to.

“The Briarwoods,” she said.  “And now, dragons.”  And Percy, wreathed in dark smoke, eyeing flashing black as he leveled his pistol at her, or turned it on himself.  She always woke before she heard the shot, with the sensation that something had taken hold of her chest and was crushing her lungs.

Percy stared at her, then reached up and took off his glasses, cleaning them with the edge of his sleeve.  “I’m sorry.  I…”

She shook her head.  “It is what it is.  My point is just…”  She looked up at him, and sighed.  Moments when they slipped so easily back into the roles of brother and sister always seemed to be followed by moments like this, when it felt painfully obvious they were strangers.  “Just… I understand not wanting to sleep.  I understand wanting to escape.  Like I said, that’s why I’ve been spending so much time sparring.”  She grimaced.  “That and if a dragon decides to attack, we’ll need every little bit of force we can muster.”

Percy was silent.  Moments stretched into a minutes, and then another.  Cassandra looked down at her hands, fiddling with the arrowhead and trying to ignore how quiet the castle was.  She could hear the faint whisper of the wind on the stones.  Nothing else stirred at this time of night anymore.  No more dead things wandering the halls, and no more dead things on the throne.  

In the daytime, the halls were filled with guards, and with citizens coming and going, bringing their grievances and suggestions before the council.  In the daytime, the white stones of the castle were bright and aglow, and everything seemed new.

In the night, there was silence.  

She had had years to adjust to the fact that she was probably the sole remaining de Rolo of her family branch, but the pain then had been numbed, by her own horrific injuries, by her fervor for rebellion, by the Briarwoods and their whispered words.  It seemed she had set aside her grief, left it in a half-forgotten corner of her mind, where she now stumbled over it every day.

“Vax,” Percy said, breaking Cassandra out of her thoughts.  “I… got in a fight with Vax.  Well.  Perhaps I cannot call it that.  Vax… hit me.”

Cassandra blinked.  By the weight he put on the words, there was clearly some significance to them she didn’t understand.  “Vax?  The half-elf, the one who rushed in to fight Professor Anders?”  A memory she did not care to revisit, but it had burned Vax’s image into her brain.  However fragmented her recollection seemed at times, she had always had a knack for names.  “What did you do to warrant that?” she asked, her tone light.

“I got Vex killed.”

Cassandra made a choking noise.  One of Percy’s companions, dead?  It shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of danger they threw themselves into, but it was.  From all she had seen of them, they seemed inseparable: a single, if contentious, fighting unit, and a… family.  More of a family to Percy than her, probably.

“She’s fine,” Percy said quickly.

Cassandra gave him a bewildered look.  Those two sentences did not fit together.  “She died…  what?”

“She…” Percy grimaced.  “…Yes.  She died.  Luckily we had a cleric and he… brought her back.”

“Brought her back?”  Cassandra flinched at the notion, thinking of Sylas Briarwood and those he turned, and the shambling creatures that Delilah had animated to patrol the halls of Whitestone and the city streets.  Bringing things back from beyond the Raven Queen’s veil was the favored hobby of the Briarwoods.

“Not like that,” he said, seeing where her thoughts were going.  “In a… wholesome way.  True life, not a facsimile.  Clerics can perform a… ritual, to restore life, within limits.  With the help of others.”

It was a different world, that her brother lived in.  One where taking on dragons and vampires was a feasible feat.  One where death didn’t matter so much, apparently.  She had lived so entrenched in death the past few years that the thought made her skin crawl out of sheer strangeness.  

“How… how did… you kill her?” Cassandra asked.  

An answer was not forthcoming.  Percy moved over to rearrange some tools on his workbench.  The quiet clink of shifting metal echoed through the quiet room, ended finally by a sigh from Percy, as he began to explain.  It was not a succinct explanation; his words were halting, and several times he had to go back and add a crucial detail he had forgotten.  He gave her the entire story of where they had gone and why, in part, she thought, to delay getting to the heart of the matter.

His voice dropped to a murmur as he told her what he had done.  Reaching forward to the coffin of the Raven Queen’s champion recklessly, and touching the enchanted armor.  

Triggering a trap that killed Vex.

His voice was trembling so badly he could hardly get the words out.  

“I couldn’t even help… bring her back.  I didn’t make the right offering, and… if it hadn’t been for Zahra’s intervention then the whole ritual might have failed.  She might have…”  He choked on the words, and put a hand out to steady himself on the edge of the worktable.  Beneath the smudges of soot on his face, he looked pale and haunted.

She leaned over and put a hand on his shoulder, for just a moment, in place of words.

“I have been telling myself that I’m going to be a better person.  I’m going to make myself better.”  Percy drew a shaky breath.  “For years my mind has not wholly been my own, and I…didn’t even fully realize it.”  He shook his head.  “I made some poor choices.  Choices that hurt people, choices that could have hurt my family… by blood or not.  I could dismiss that as the effect of having a demon whispering in my ear, but I got Vex killed without any outside help.”  He laughed breathlessly, sounding like he was trying very hard not to cry.  “I suppose I have never had the best judgment.”

Cassandra chuckled.  “I’m the last person who can talk about good judgment,” she said.  “But I’d say yours is a lot better than mine.”  She threw the arrowhead in the air, and caught it, examining its point so she wouldn’t have to look at his agonized expression.  “But I’m still trying to figure out how to make judgements.  I hadn’t really, truly been making them for myself for years, until I killed Lady Briarwood.  Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.  It’s all sort of a haze,” she said.  “I still don’t know… exactly what you went through, brother, but I don’t think you’ve been making decisions with a clear head either.  It’s too easy to get used to being someone else’s instrument.  It’s hard to adjust to being culpable for my own actions again.  And…  I don’t know everything of what happened to you, but…  I think we’re in similar boats.”

“That’s probably true,” he said.

She smiled wryly.  “But you broke away from it, when it tried to force you to hurt… me.  And your friends.  And that’s what matters.  We De Rolos might make a few stupid decisions.  We’re still learning how to make decisions again.  But I know… I know you would never chose anything that hurt your friends intentionally. ”  She didn’t voice the second half of that; the fact that it had taken considerably more for her to break away, that she had tried to hurt Percy.  The resentment the Briarwoods had nourished over her years of imprisonment had valid roots, but she had tried to kill her brother.  Most days, that was more than enough to fuel her self-loathing.  “I… know it’s difficult.  I can’t make decisions here without double and triple-checking with every member of the council, and I still make mistakes.  Drastic mistakes, sometimes.   But it… feels good, too, in a way.  Taking responsibility is what I was raised for, what we both were raised for.”  

Percy liked to duck behind his scholarly persona, hiding and denying any competence in anything beyond his worktable and sketchbook, and now his guns.  But it didn’t work near so well as it had when they were younger, and he truly had been oblivious.  It was clear, to her at least, that political cunning and the ability to lead were not qualities her brother lacked, per se; they were qualities that he did not exercise openly.  

He laughed.  “I have no illusions of perfection; that doesn’t make me feel any better about getting Vex killed.”

“You were stupid.  You’re often stupid.  You’ll be less stupid next time,” Cassandra said.  “It’s not because you’re corrupted, or possessed, or… wrong.  It sounds like common old stupidity.  It doesn’t negate the fact that you saved Whitestone and broke a pact with a demon.”  

“To be fair, I had a lot of help-” he began, but she broke him off by jumping down from her perch on the worktable and hugging him.

She could count the number of times she had hugged Percy on her fingers; and most of them had been since she had somehow been salvaged from the ruins of the person who once was Cassandra de Rolo.  

Their family had not been the most outwardly affectionate.  Overt displays of sentiments were uncouth.  But that did not mean their childhood home had been frigid.  Love had always had a place in Whitestone.  It seemed to be quietly imbued in the stones of the castle itself, exuding an aura of familiarity and comfort and home.  That had all been stripped away by that night, and the Briarwoods, and the years of horrors; but Cassandra had been feeling its absence most of late, in the long night hours she spent pacing the halls.  

Whitestone still did not feel like home; but for a moment, as Percy hugged her back, she was home.  

“Don’t leave,” she murmured, suddenly, and felt foolish as soon as the words left her mouth.  “I didn’t mean that.”

He drew back and eyed her at arms’ length.  “I’m not sure how to respond to that, Cassandra.”

She shook her head.  “You have your duty and I have mine.  I only… If… If you survive,” she said, taking a deep breath.  “You will promise me that you will come home.  To Whitestone.  For a time, at least.  I need your help.  No… I don’t need it.  But I want your help.  I…  I want to be family again, Percy.  I want Whitestone to feel like home.”

He blinked, seemingly caught off guard.  “I… well…  I suppose…  Yes.  Yes.  If we all survive this, by some miracle, then… I owe Whitestone some of my time.  I owe you some of my time.”  He glanced around at the workshop.  “I can see why this place would be lonely.”  He turned and flashed her a small smile.  “But we did bring back some guests.  I have no doubt they will liven the place up.”

“Guests?” Cassandra asked, half-interested, half irritated he had invented them without consulting her.  “This is my castle, remember.”

“Our castle,” he said, patting her shoulder and stepping away.  “You’re on the council, that doesn’t make you the head of the family.”

“I’m sorry, I thought you running off to adventure and leaving everything on my shoulders was more than enough indication that you gave up any claim to that title,” she snapped.

“I’m not claiming it; I’m merely stating you can’t either.”

She made a frustrated noise.  “I don’t know why I bother talking to you.”

“Does that mean you’ll leave me to get back to my work?” Percy asked, holding out a hand.  “I’ll need that arrowhead you stole back.”

“This is my castle,” she said.  “My materials.”

“Even if I conceded that to you, I made the arrowhead,” Percy said.  “And the literal fate of the world may rest on that arrowhead.”

“You’re so melodramatic,” Cassandra said, grinning wickedly.  “I’ll give it back to you… if.”

“If what?”

“You make me a gun.”  It was something she had been turned over and over in her head.  Her brother’s deadly little inventions scared her more than she cared to admit.  Maybe wielding one would chase away her nightmares about Ripley and Percy and demons made of smoke.  

“Absolutely not,” he snapped.  “The last thing Tal’dorei needs is another De Rolo with a gun.”  His eyes narrowed.  “Besides, you fight more along the lines of Vax and Vex; stealth.  You would have no use for a gun.”

“If a dragon comes to Whitestone, I doubt it will politely land and wait for me to sneak up and stab it with a dagger,” Cassandra said.  “I want to be able to protect the city, and the castle.  An with something like that…”  She gestured at the far end of the worktable, where Bad News was partially disassembled.  “That might give us a chance, at least.”  She watched his expression.  “If you don’t trust me with one, maybe you could mount it on the castle walls.  Like a siege weapon.”

Percy glared at her, but she could see gears turning in his head.  Whether they were the right ones… well, time would tell.  “I’m not building you a gun,” he said.

She shrugged.  “You’re no fun,” she said, and tossed the arrowhead to him, overhand.  

He caught it.  “You should be abed, Lady de Rolo.  You have responsibilities.”

“I never can sleep,” she said.  “I just end up wandering the halls.  Sometimes I feel like I’m one of her undead.”  The thought made him shudder.   “Would you mind… would you mind if I stayed here?  For a little while?”

Percy gave her a long look, and then shook his head.  “Stay if you like.  Just don’t touch anything else.”

Cassandra laughed, and retreated to the far corner of the workshop, where his leather travel bag still sat packed.  She rummaged through it until she found a blanket, and curled up in the corner to watch him begin to inspect the arrowhead.

The clang of metal on metal and the heat of the forge might have been oppressive to most, but it was the most vibrant sign of life that Whitestone had seen in months.  She curled up, lulled by the familiarity, and slept so soundly that she was not roused when Percy took a break from his tinkering to carry her up to her room.

**Author's Note:**

> Percy and Cassandra give me so many feelings, man. I thought a conversation like this might be good for them.  
> I wrote this back in... April? I think, and sent it with some other stuff in for Critmas. I've been meaning to post it here for a while, but to be honest I'm still sort of embarrassed I sent it so I've been putting off looking at it again!  
> Also, the song 'Long and Lost' by Florence and the Machine is so Cassandra it hurts my heart, and that's what a wrote this fic to mostly. Give it a listen if you want feels.


End file.
